Review by Andy Ford
Richie Venton was an early pioneer of Marxism in Northern Ireland and subsequently one of the key leaders of the struggle of the Militant-influenced Liverpool City Council in the 1980s. He is now industrial organiser for the Scottish Socialist Party and was recently elected to the Executive of USDAW. Despite political differences we may have with Richie today, his Marxist analysis of the tumultuous days of the early Northern Irish civil rights movement is well worth reading.
The pamphlet is a reprint of the first chapter of “Socialism not Sectarianism”, published in 1989, and it describes how the early civil rights movement was derailed along sectarian lines. It is to be hoped that the rest could also be republished soon.
Richie begins by describing the mass demonstrations, nascent cross-community unity, police thuggery, barricades, no-go areas and pogroms of 1968 that rocked British and Irish capitalism to their foundations. It was a mixture of revolution and reaction just like Irish history itself – from the united strikes of the Belfast engineers and the Limerick Soviet of 1919, to the anti-Catholic pogroms of 1920/22 where thousands of workers, mainly Catholic but some Protestant, were driven from their homes.
Richie analyses the partition of 1921 that created two unviable, poverty-stricken and reactionary statelets. Neither could develop. In the south, even by 1946, nearly half the population were still employed in agriculture, while thousands emigrated. In the north, 37% of Belfast houses were overcrowded and in Fermanagh 50% of homes were unfit for habitation. Unemployment stood at 100,000 and was 18% in the 1970s.
Politically, each state was undemocratic and dominated by a weak and therefore vicious ruling class. In the north, the property vote lasted until 1960 and tenants had no vote at all. The council boundaries were gerrymandered to ensure Protestant rule, even in Derry, where most residents were Catholic. All this was kept in place by rampant police brutality. In the south the Catholic Church dominated the state with total control of education, women’s health and reproductive rights.
Poor housing and unemployment affected all workers
Trade tariffs had not worked for the Southern Irish capitalists and from 1958 they threw the county open to inward investment. By the 1970s two thirds of the 100 largest companies were owned wholly or partly by British firms, showing the emptiness of the establishment’s “nationalism”.
In the north, there was rampant sectarian discrimination. Richie gives figures on housing and jobs proving this beyond doubt. But he makes an important point: “However, whilst Protestant workers were fed a diet of bigotry, they were given little else. It was the capitalists who lined their pockets from low wages, slum housing and high rents…Contrary to the ignorant assertions of many republicans and even some Labour lefts today, the Protestant workers were not some pampered elite”
This idea of the “privileged” Protestant working class is why Sinn Fein and those sections of the left who defer to them will never find a road to the Protestant workers and therefore the road to a solution of the national question in Ireland.
Richie describes the beginning of the movement for civil rights with the Derry civil rights march of October 1968. It was not organised by republicans but by housing campaigners and the Derry Young Socialists with some Protestant involvement. It was met, however, by ferocious police attack by the sectarian RUC. Over a hundred were hospitalised. But every action causes a reaction and just like Bloody Sunday in 1972, repression galvanised resistance. A far larger march assembled on 16th November. The RUC were unable to attack 15,000 people with the same impunity and under mass pressure Derry Corporation was abolished and much of the Special powers Act was repealed. Mass action had achieved more in months than decades of IRA terrorism.
Ian Paisley the organiser of Protestant thugs
But then the Northern Irish government dawdled and in reaction a group of students formed a more left-wing group, the People’s Democracy and planned a march from Belfast to Derry. It was met at Burntollet Bridge by a sectarian mob, organised by Ian Paisley, father of the current DUP MP, which viciously attacked the march in full view of the RUC.
Richie argues that at that point the trade union leaders and Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) could have stepped in to champion a working-class approach to the question of equal rights, and without this, the civil rights movement degenerated into a “purely sectarian struggle”. He points out that at that time Protestant workers were sympathetic or neutral and Paisley could only muster his mobs “from the rural, lumpen and middle-class elements”.
The NILP had a solid position in Northern Ireland, gaining 26% of the vote in 1962 on a non-sectarian programme and holding large youth meetings, but they failed to call for socialist measures to make life better for all workers. Ritchie quotes Bernadette Devlin, “We realised that however nicely we put it, more jobs for Catholics meant less jobs for Protestants. That was a realistic fear of theirs”. The only way of cutting across this fear was a socialist programme that promised a better existence for all workers in terms of housing, jobs and living standards. But the main civil rights leaders, by keeping within the bounds of capitalism, could not promise the radical measures needed –minimum wages, mass house-building and a planned economy – to ensure a decent life foe all. This left Protestant workers open to Paisley’s demagoguery.
Even in 1969, as the candidate of Peoples Democracy, Bernadette Devlin was elected in mid-Ulster with significant Protestant support. But reaction was gathering and in August 1969 the RUCS and armed Protestant thugs attacked the Bogside area of Derry. Later in Belfast, six were killed and whole streets burned out. It was at that point that the British government sent in the troops. The troops were sent in to safeguard the interests of the British establishment, not to save the Catholics from Paisley’s mobs.
Mass movements needed for any meaningful concessions
Ritchie was one of those who opposed entry of the troops, calling instead for joint workers defence. To those who say it was “never going to happen” he points out the joint defence patrols in Ardoyne area of Belfast and the opposition of 9,000 Harland and Wolf workers to sectarian threats against Catholics.
He ends by drawing the key lessons of the period: that mass movements are necessary to win any meaningful concessions from the establishment but also that restricting demands to democratic reforms without socialist measures is a recipe for just sharing out poverty and this drives Protestants towards Orangeism.
Common misery is the basis for common struggle. Cross-class ‘Catholic unity’ can never liberate Catholic workers as it precisely continues division from the one million Protestant workers. The monster of Protestant sectarianism can only be undercut by a working-class movement
Class not Creed is an excellent summary of the main events and political issues surrounding the events of the period. It reminds us that the descent into ‘the troubles’ and entrenched sectarian division was not natural or pre-ordained. The comrades of the Militant, such as Ritchie himself, maintained a Marxist analysis in the most difficult circumstances, without bending to nationalism or sectarianism, and showed a way out for the working class and youth.
Sadly, with the impasse of capitalism worldwide and the weakness of the forces of genuine socialism, we see nationalist, populist and sectarian forces are on the rise, so the analysis and perspective of Marxism is more relevant than ever.
December 3, 2018
“Class not Creed”, £3 from Ritchie Venton, from:
http://richieventon.blogspot.com/2018/10/class-not-creed-1968.html
